Abstract
Recent advances in humanoid robotics have opened up many new directions for humanoid robotics research. Multimedia and arts are applications with significant growth opportunities. In this paper, we introduce magic shows as a benchmark and research problem for humanoid robots and discuss our flexible and versatile system architecture. The goal is to have a humanoid robot perform as a magician in front of an audience. Note that we focus on magic performances that require complex manipulation and interaction of the robot instead of tricks where the robot is passive and used mainly as a prop. So in our tricks, the magic is critically dependent on the skills of the humanoid robot. Furthermore, a successful magic show requires that the robot interacts meaningfully and goal directed with the audience. We describe the technical details of a pen and drawing magic trick, the human-robot collaboration, hardware architecture, and software architecture of our system. One interesting aspect of our system is the inclusion of various personalities for the robot magician. Overall, the robot performed the magic tricks well in the competition and won third place at the IEEE IROS Humanoid Application Challenge(HAC) 2019 in Macau.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the “Chinese Language and Technology Center” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan, and Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, under Grants no. MOST 111-2918-I-003-003-, MOST 110-2923-E-003-001-MY3, and MOST 110-2221-E-003-023. We are grateful to the National Center for High-performance Computing for computer time and facilities to conduct this research.
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Jeehyun Yang, Jaesik Jeong, and Eko R. Jamzuri are contributed equally to this work.
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Yang, J., Jeong, J., Jamzuri, E.R. et al. Humanoid robot magic show performance. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 34609–34630 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14690-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14690-w